Digital trustees
By Rebecca Rae-Evans
If you work for a charity, you’ll have some trustees, probably at least three. They might focus on comms, finance, and operations trustees. And yeah, I know, they can probably be a bit of a pain sometimes. Their role is to challenge you. Ask you the difficult questions and keep you on track.
Let’s assume that your charity delivers face-to-face services. Your offline campaigns do well, but your donors tend to be in the older demographic. You have always wondered what digital could do for your organisation, but it can be difficult convincing the trustees to give it a go.
You try to work some magic on Twitter in your spare time, and you keep the aging website up and running. Despite all this, you can’t seem to justify getting any more done, and discussions with the board don’t ever really seem to go anywhere. With an older donor base, it can be a challenge to persuasively make the argument for your charity to increase its digital maturity. And maybe you aren’t really a digital expert anyway, you know that something more is possible, but not exactly what.
Maybe this has been weighing on your mind for a while, and in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, you struggled to progress your digital agenda. You’ve managed to get some Zoom calls set up for your service users, but you know there’s a lot more that you could be doing, and your audience has paid the price, being left without services.
You have options:
Get some digital volunteers on board to help you deliver on the ground (Try our Help a Charity programme if you’re based in Greater Manchester)
Train yourself up so you start to understand digital strategy and delivery methods (Have a look at going along to a Design Hop.)
Both are great. But you’ll need senior support. Recruiting a Digital Trustee will help put conversations around digital firmly on your organisation’s agenda. Instead of you wrestling to build buy-in on your own, a Digital Trustee can help with those discussions and bring some digital leadership into your organisation. They’ll be there to support you with building and iterating upon an ongoing digital strategy.
Becoming more digitally mature is an ongoing task, it changes, it morphs. Even if you feel that you’re fairly digitally savvy as an organisation, having a Digital Trustee can mean that you have someone dedicated to looking at the digital landscape for opportunities, and keeping your charity relevant.
If you’re just curious, or actively seeking a Digital Trustee, come along to our online event on the 22nd July. We’ve a great line-up of speakers:
We have a charity who has successfully established a Digital Trustee talking about their journey and top tips. Find out from them what it’s really like and if it’s been helpful.
We have an individual talking about what it’s been like to be a Digital Trustee, hear about how best to work alongside one.
Finally we also have the CEO of Reach, who are a volunteer organisation who have been running a campaign helping people recruit Digital Trustees. Hear about why you should get one, how to best recruit for one and some other great insights.
There will be opportunities to ask questions of each of our speakers and a chance to connect with people in the audience. We’re hoping to have both sides of the coin at the event, with charities looking for digital trustees and digital experts thinking about becoming one. It might give you the chance to meet some potential trustees. So feel free to bring any links to trustee jobs you want to promote.
We’ll start at 6:00 and finish at 7:30pm. Sign up on our Meet-up page and we’ll email a link. https://www.meetup.com/Tech-for-Good-Live/events/269643484/